In Support of Paternity Leave
It’s the 21st century — Why dads and moms deserve better parental leave coverage
In 2015, eBay (my employer) announced an enhanced parental leave policy that gave new dads three months of paid leave to help care for a newborn child. The three months could be broken up and used anytime during the first year after baby’s birth. This was awesome because Maya was born in 2016, and I took full advantage of the opportunity.
If the title of my post isn’t obvious enough, I greatly valued the time off. While extended paid leave for both mothers and fathers is becoming standard practice in the tech industry (at least here in the Bay Area), I believe that this a) needs to become standard practice across more organizations and b) anything less than 6 months is not sufficient.
I guess it’s worth quickly breaking down what “parental leave” policies entail. Essentially, there are 2 aspects:
1) Job security — if a dad takes time off to care for his child, his job will still be there when he returns. I believe this should be mandated.
2) Income support — this gets very complicated and can vary by country. I don’t have a strong perspective here as is such a nuanced consideration (eg, should employer pay or the government, meaning tax payers? Should it vary based on job type? What are potential unintended economic consequences?)
At the broadest level, parental leave support is terrible in the United States because….well, there isn’t any government mandated parental leave policies. In fact, check this out:
According to research by the WORLD Policy Analysis Center at UCLA, only a small handful of countries do not have a national parental leave law: New Guinea, Suriname, a few South Pacific island nations…and the United States!
Can you believe that? There are countries on this list where oppression of women is widespread and institutionalized, and even those countries have maternal leave laws!
The purpose of this post isn’t to dig into the historical reasons why the United States does not have such coverage, nor is the purpose to dive into political/financial discussions around why it may not be the most feasible economic policy to implement it here. But, I will say that I find it fairly shocking that a (still relatively) poor country like India mandates 26 weeks of paid leave for mothers, while the most economically powerful nation on Earth mandates 0.
With Maya, I used 10 weeks of leave upfront and saved the rest for later. With Ravi, I have just come off an 8-week leave and still have 4 weeks available if/when needed. During both of these periods, my wife was on leave as well so we had a luxury that many people don’t get. But let me tell you — even with two of us 100% available (plus help from my parents), it was still extremely exhausting. Would we be able to manage if I had to return to work earlier? Of course. My mom always tells the story (perhaps slightly embellished) of how my dad went on an international business trip the day after I was born and how she literally had no help to take care of me and my 3 year old brother.
At the same time though, I believe there is value in being able to bond with your child when they are newborns... or at least I tell myself to justify my own view point. If you’ve ever taken an introductory psychology class before, then you might vaguely remember the monkey studies that demonstrated the importance of developing attachment with babies through smell and touch. Perhaps this image brings back memories (Psych 2, you were one of my favorite classes):
I’m speculating here, but this study (by the esteemed Harry Harlow) probably spawned all the the skin-to-skin recommendations prevalent in the hospital Labor & Delivery ward.
Another reason why parental leave is important is due to the simple reality of the world many of us now live in: Both parents generally work full time, which means both parents need to be actively involved in raising the child. Since both parents share the financial burden of supporting the household, both have to share the child raising duties these days as well. Even in instances where the household is more “traditional” (father working, stay at home mom), I’d venture to say that the “Digital Dads” out there are more “woke” as a generation and have a stronger desire to play an active role in child raising (from birth) than previous generations. If you take a step back, this is a profound generational shift and quite simply our policies have not kept pace.
At this point, you might be thinking, “I get it, parenting is hard. But what’s the incentive for employers to support such policies?”
Well, the obvious answer is employee engagement and retention. When an employer shows goodwill and personal care towards an employee, that employee invariably will feel some level of debt towards the employer (even if implicitly) and any wage support during this time will likely be paid back in multiples. I don’t have time to do the research, but turnover is a huge corporate expense (HR expenses, lost productivity, etc), so the retention benefits alone make these policies worth it.
Other reasons that make this a good business practice include PR (i.e., free marketing), employee recruiting (makes the company more attractive to top talent), and legal (minimizes potential wrongful termination lawsuits, especially from mothers).
The Silicon Valley is on the forefront of change when it comes to parental leave and Zuck taking time off after the birth of his daughter was well published. We are on the right track in some regard, but I argue we need to go even further: 1) extend family leave coverage to at least 6 months, and 2) provide equal benefits to both mothers and fathers…or, allocate a block of time and allow each couple to divvy it up how they like based on their unique situation (like Germany).
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